


An Imagined Affair

by bluesyturtle



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Amputation, Autosarcophagy, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Captivity, Gen, Manipulation, Not Canon Compliant, Paralysis, Sadism, Season/Series 02 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 15:24:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1433401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is meant to be his own Last Supper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Imagined Affair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SevenCorvus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SevenCorvus/gifts).



> _A sky as black as regret / Is rolling aside for the blue / Impossible face to forget / These feelings belong in a zoo_

Gideon wrongly assumes Dr. Hannibal Lecter will brain him immediately following dinner. He makes every bite count, though his stomach turns and burbles acidly beneath his skin. There’s no accounting for taste. The man can cook. Gideon may not have even known it was his own leg if he hadn’t been very much awake when it was rended from his body, if he hadn’t seen Lecter slicing through the layers of his skin and his muscle.

Maybe he could stomach it better if he hadn’t heard the bone saw whirring and if he hadn’t closed his eyes around the faint vibrations in the table tickling the backs of his arms.

_Circumstances._

He swallows down another scant mouthful that’s still too much. Lecter shows him enough mercy not to augment the dwindling sample of shank a la Abel, but it’s not mercy. Succor has no room at this table with either of them. It just happens to be the only word that even minutely applies.

The truth is that it’s closer to a power play and a good one at that. It works.

Lecter eats, and they don’t talk. Gideon cuts large sections of the meat on his plate, chews, and tries not to taste it while it’s on his tongue. The portion on his plate disappears as he consumes it. His face feels cold and his fingers stiff, but he soldiers on. Eventually Lecter takes his plate and clears the table, and they sit in silence again. His survival instinct tells him to talk, to bargain, to plead, but he won’t. 

Will told him something along these lines would happen; he’d said the Ripper would come for him.

Gideon would be flattered if his murder had anything to do with what he’d done, but it’s entirely about Lecter, and there’s no way he can’t know that it is. That’s part of it, part of Lecter’s asserting his will over Gideon. It’s ironic actually since he’d asserted Will over Gideon once already. Perhaps it’s only fitting he takes off the surrogate gloves and handles the act himself. Revenge tastes sweeter when the blood on one’s hands isn’t merely figurative, and Gideon is one to know.

Frederick’s blood splashed his hands, carnal and violent. Gideon’s blood touched Will, and now Lecter feasts on his flesh. He’s made a feast of everything, in more ways than just the one. His gluttony is quite admirable from where Gideon’s sitting, even if what’s happened to him is despicable. Hostility would take too much effort, too much cognition he doesn’t care to waste on useless rage.

_The tragedy is not to die, Abel, but to be wasted._

He takes a long drink of wine after Lecter refills his own glass. The tragedy is not to die but to waste this time.

“How many different types does it pass for?”

For a moment Lecter considers his wry question about the meat. Gideon waits, prepared to clarify what he’s asking, but Lecter doesn’t ask.

He answers, evenly, “ _Many_ different types.”

Gideon swallows. He has the stifled sensation of there being food lodged in his throat. It’s psychological, he thinks. His brain is waiting for his body to run from this trauma, but the trauma pervades. He drinks more wine. Lecter studies him like a bug under a microscope, a Kafkaesque cockroach with an apple lodged in his back.

Apples, oranges, T4 fractures of the vertebra; there isn’t a difference, not really.

“I imagine on some level that must grate on your nerves,” Gideon offers after a long, thoughtful pause.

Lecter brings his glass to his nose and inhales before making a small circling motion with his wrist. He sips and eyes Gideon over the tipped glass, gives him a small smirk as he sets it down.

He concedes, “Sometimes.”

“How does Will Graham play into it?” Gideon isn’t stalling anymore. He’s just curious. “You’ve done quite a number on him.”

“I would have liked to see him brought to his full potential.” Hannibal traces oblongs into the foot of the glass with his first two fingers. “He had it in him all along.”

Gideon nods, the hint of a smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. If he let it grow it would blossom into a sneer. He smothers it with memories he has of running, climbing, jumping. He’s frowning again before he knows it.

“I could have told you he did,” Gideon murmurs, bringing his glass to his lips again, now actively trying to get drunk. Lecter refills his glass. Gideon watches him do it. “That former patient of yours has a tendency for shooting anyone who harms the women in his life.”

Abigail Hobbs has been the first, followed by Alana Bloom, and then that agent of Jack Crawford’s.

Garrett Jacob Hobbs, Gideon himself, and Hannibal Lecter had each found themselves on the business end of a loaded weapon in Will Graham’s hands. In Lecter’s case the means had been different, but the intention had been the same. The drive had been unique, for each of them and of varying intensities, but the common denominator had remained consistent throughout. Gideon should say _denominators,_ plural: Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter.

“We’re marked men he just hasn’t killed yet,” Gideon continues liltingly. He takes another pull of the wine, acetic, dry, and rich. “He crucified you, and yet it’s _my_ Last Supper. Does everything backward, doesn’t he?”

Lecter doesn’t look happy, but Gideon can tell he’s going to allow this line of inquiry. Nothing’s going to keep him alive beyond tonight, but the goal isn’t to survive anymore. His endgame is only to learn while he has time left to do it. They’re ephemeral flesh, here one minute and then gone—rotted or digested or dissected or catalogued.

_A damn slippery life, indeed._

“We learn from our mentors, to an extent,” Lecter grants. 

“This thing you’ve teased out of him, you’re sure it was there _before_ you destroyed his life?”

Lecter looks at him. Gideon might be intimidated, but there’s nothing left for his captor to take from him except for a few things from an assorted selection of anticipated losses. Gideon foresees pain and further mutilation; he doesn’t fear the promised abuse because it’s non-negotiable. He already fed Gideon his leg, forced him to quite literally put his foot in his mouth for his previous slander. Bad enough he’d failed once to have him killed. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Gideon informs him, “I did save your life.”

“Did you?”

Lecter’s expression is open, intrigued. The answer won’t change his mind, won’t alter Gideon’s fate.

“Chances are Jack Crawford will start aiming his efforts into Chilton’s business,” he says with an aloof, musical cadence in his voice. “He’s bound to find all _sorts_ of incriminating things with that one. And besides, did you think Dr. Bloom figured it out all by herself about Will Graham finally deciding to play ball for your cause?”

Entertained, he retorts, “Would my murder have constituted what you call my cause?”

“Do you think it wouldn’t have because you wouldn’t have seen it firsthand?”

“I would have lived it,” Lecter replies stoically. “I would have died experiencing it.”

“Wonder what that’s like,” Gideon drawls ironically.

“Yes.” Lecter nods, perfectly austere and put together. He looks exactly the way he did the night Will took Gideon to him, when he folded his hands on the table and firmly denied Gideon’s claim to the Chesapeake Ripper. “All of us do.”

“Killers, Dr. Lecter?”

“Human beings, Abel.”

Gideon laughs, only in part because of the implication. Partly he laughs because Lecter keeps dropping his title in increasingly frequent intervals.

“I stopped worrying about death when you moseyed into my hospital room.”

“An animal of its own to worry about death; completely separate from that anxiety is a patient appraisal of the event as inevitable and natural.”

Gideon smirks. “You love to play God, don’t you?”

Lecter smiles, scans the whole of Gideon’s face and makes his skin crawl where he can still feel it.

“Who’s playing?”

He stands and rounds the back of Gideon’s chair, beyond the point where he can track him with his eyes. Hands drop to his shoulders and squeeze through the borrowed bathrobe. For just a few seconds it’s comfortable, though unwanted, always unwanted.

“I let you leave my home once to do as you would.”

“And you sent your bloodhound after me with a handgun and a motive to drive the bullet.”

“You sent the same woman you would have killed in my name to rescue me from a similar fate.”

“It’s not nearly so heroic as all that,” Gideon murmurs, leaning back as much as he can to try and find Lecter’s eyes behind him by stretching his neck back. He enunciates, “I stood my ground.”

“Every person makes a sacrifice.”

“Just like every sinner carries his cross,” he quips back. Lecter’s hands go still over his clavicles, fingers digging in, calculated more than he is enraged. “Time about up, doctor?”

“We’re nearing that time, yes.”

Nearing the time for his time to be up, what a tricky turn of phrases; what a funny way to talk about the end of his life. But then, Gideon is no stranger to the delights or to the consequences of badmouthing the dead, specifically the ones killed by his hands. He had, after all, found himself thrown over the stairs because of it—though maybe the blame for that incident could be shifted. Responsibility is such a fickle thing. People are weak. The systems keeping them in line only enable their corruption; they only breed further evils to breed further evils, and so on.

“I sure hope they don’t put you in there with him,” Gideon sighs, aimless now in a buzzing state of intoxication as the alcohol mingles with his unsettled stomach and revolted nerves. “Killing you was just him stretching his legs. You survived him,” Gideon concedes, “but he had every intention of putting you down. That’s all that matters, you know, that at the end of the day he meant to be a killer—meant to be _your_ killer.”

“He meant to be your killer, too, Abel.”

Gideon shrugs under Hannibal’s hands, moving his shoulders into his palms and his clavicles into his fingers. “All paths do lead to the same destination, don’t they, Dr. Lecter?”

Lecter pulls Gideon’s arm around his neck and hoists him out of his chair. Gideon reaches out for his IV stand and dutifully guides it along with one hand while holding on with his other. It’s degrading, of course; all of it is, depraved and abject and squeezing his heart in his chest. That tremble returns, the one he felt when Lecter first sat him down in that chair and made a comment about the tourniquet holding splendidly well. He’d remarked that the sutures were doing their job and keeping the flap and muscle mass in place.

The back of Lecter’s neck is warm, though Gideon tries not to touch his skin. It’s less out of timidity or shyness than it is revulsion. He does feel startlingly less repulsed the longer he has to exist in this version of reality. At least that’s something.

Lecter carries him to the wine cellar, down to a pantry, and then sets him down gently to open a trapdoor, which is interesting and so horrifically cliché Gideon can’t help but roll his eyes. He’s going to be tortured and killed in a hidden underground room, and he can’t even put up a decent fight. He rolls his eyes again after Lecter picks him up, and they begin their descent into what he can only classify as the basement.

Because Gideon apparently has a love for condemning himself, he chooses this moment to look back and bring his eyes to Lecter’s while they stand, still, in the light. He’s Orpheus checking to see if Eurydice is still there, still holding his hand on their last step traversing the threshold between hell and the solid, green earth.

It’s a bastardized rendition of the scene they make, but his mind makes connections that he can’t always filter. Sometimes he makes his decisions or invests his sympathies in the wrong corners for the same reason.

Lecter asks him, voice no quieter or sweeter than if he were inquiring about the weather, “Are you afraid?”

Gideon shakes his head and says no. It’s the truth.

“Death is inevitable,” Gideon mumbles, using Lecter’s words from start to finish. He looks away and redirects his gaze down the steps. He says, “Natural.”

_It’s hard to have anything, isn’t it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it._

He notices several glaring oddities at the landing of the stairs. Before the lights flutter on he can see light reflecting off translucent sheets hanging from the ceiling. He’s not sure exactly what they are. The last time he was down here—upon feeling the familiar texture of the table beneath his elbows, shoulders, and the crown of his head it slithers back in cascades—he hadn’t had the clarity he needed to really observe. He does now while Lecter moves around and notes the chains hanging down in neat, swooping arcs.

Yes, he was definitely here before. And if his memory serves…

He turns his head to the left just as Lecter is returning in a clear plastic suit, also familiar. Gideon can see the scalpel in his right hand and the bone saw in his left.

 _That’s right,_ he thinks blearily. _I do have another leg._

The robe is being worked off him. He doesn’t move to aid or impede the process; he merely lies flat, silently watching that which he cannot see.

He has no desire to watch Dr. Lecter go to work on him for the second time. His eyes are on the far wall. The glossy flap obstruct his view the same way a waterfall hides the rock face beneath, but it can’t mask the noise, the labored breathing. Even when he cuts through Gideon’s skin again and that phantom part of his body that isn’t his anymore burns, he can still hear it. He can hear it because that part of him doesn’t belong to Lecter anymore than it belongs to Gideon. It’s neither of theirs to claim; it’s only energy and matter and friction.

His heart beats faster when Lecter sets down the scalpel with an audible metallic click. He lays his head flat again and stares hard at the ceiling because Lecter ditching the scalpel means he’ll be trading it for the bone saw.

He can’t feel it, but the noise is enough. Gideon’s never had a fear of God or death or pain, but the shrill, grating din is like getting a root canal from the eighth circle of hell—or Gideon suspects that’s the one he’ll be cast down into, the one set aside for the fraudulent. Lecter’s circle is just beyond the scope of his, aptly, in the realm of treachery alongside Cain and Judas Iscariot.

Trust Gideon to revert to Dante in the eleventh hour. It’s not as if they hadn’t had quite enough to do with religious symbolism for one night.

The whirring stops, and Gideon listens for the decadent little snap of the bone disconnecting, but there’s nothing. There’s no feeling and no fear. Bile rises in his throat, and his ears burn with blood and ringing, but he isn’t in pain. It’s not a blessing. It’s an atrocity.

Lecter takes up the scalpel again.

 _That’s right,_ his spinning, delirious mind supplies. _There are two bones below the knee._

He turns his head again toward the far wall. Curiosity mounting, he slurs, maybe having lost more blood than the IV in his arm has managed to pump into his body, “Who’ve you got there?”

Lecter coolly replies, “Someone very important to me.”

“Ah,” Gideon exhales, trying to say more but liking the drag of the utterance on his lungs too much to give it up for empty words.

He hums, fingers grasping idly at the edges of the table. He really can’t see much. The lights sharpen his vision, but the translucent, flimsy walls surrounding them distort the physical reality enough for his waning lucidity to be rendered completely useless. He hums again, distracted by what might be his life pouring out of him in large draughts and beginning to fill up the surface of the table at the edges of his vision. It doesn’t reach where he can feel it. The scalpel clicks, and Lecter takes up the bone saw.

Gideon gulps down a big breath of air and briefly wishes he knew how to swallows his own tongue. It would be better than the alien tugging on that part of him that’s been lost forever but that itches and scalds with an incurable ache all the same. He bangs his head once on the table, shivers involuntarily, and expels a rough wind for a breath. He repeats the cycle four times, gritting his teeth all the while, before the noise stops and throws the vast room into unblemished silence. Gideon’s forehead has broken out into a cool sweat. The bottom of his shirt is sticky beneath his back, and he has no idea what bodily fluid is causing the fabric to cling to his body.

He sighs, and the sound is shaky and gruff, too relieved to be humiliated. Lecter makes a noise, too. Something vaguely pleased or satisfied, at least. Gideon doesn’t react when he lifts the severed leg from the table and brandishes it like it’s a fish he caught or a deer he killed.

 _Meat is meat,_ he attempts to say, but his mouth has gone dry and his throat has closed up.

“That’s all for tonight, Abel.”

He manages to rasp, pitifully, “What?”

There’s no reply. Lecter sews him up, leaves him with his stumps to drunkenly question the daunting isolation closing in all around him. Lecter’s walking away, but he goes the way of the far wall, and when he weaves in between the makeshift waterfall of clear plastic, the sheaves judder after him like ripples in a pond. Gideon looks after him as he goes, and a flash of dark hair is all he sees before they settle and obfuscate the breathing, suffering mass of human separated from him by such miniscule boundaries: space and warped perception.

The flash is so brief he doubts his eyes at first, but only at first. He’s not so far down the path of exsanguination that his vision has begun to go dark around the edges. It doesn’t take a genius or an artist, and Gideon has always prided himself on being a healthy cross between the two.

He lays his head down again where he had been straining to look. Lecter is still moving around behind the skewed reflective perimeter that frames the box in which he’s left Gideon alone. It’s only in the box that he’s alone. Outside the box is Hannibal Lecter fiddling with his second amputated leg. Tucked away in this dark hole and restricted to the far wall is Abigail Hobbs.

“We’re supposed to be dead,” Gideon mumbles, shuddering and sweating, when Lecter comes back to his side.

“And yet we live.”

Hannibal Lecter is tall, even when Gideon isn’t laid out on an operating table missing both his legs and going cold all over. His smile is peaceful and collected and regal. He does something with Gideon’s lower half and drapes a chilled and wonderful lump of _stuff_ across his chest that he can’t presently identify. It makes him feel better, though he’s splintered at his center. That part of him that went jagged and blurry when Chilton put it in his head that he was the Chesapeake Ripper throbs. Gideon tells himself it’s psychological, but he’s sure there’s something else writhing and dying there, too.

Lecter says, smiling still and serene, “A precious gift, life.”

Gideon deflates through his shoulders and swivels his head to the left again, licking his dry lips. He asks, “Is it?”

The hand in his hair is clinical but soft. Lecter’s eyes are hard but glint with something akin to mischief that Gideon tries to decipher but wholly can’t. It’s the joy that throws him, makes this experience so uncanny. He gets the excitement, the rush of power, and the ego trip, all of it. He even gets the glee. Hell, Gideon murdered his wife, after all; it doesn’t get much more gleeful than that.

As if reading Gideon’s mind, and maybe he is, he says, “Death is inevitable; life is fleeting.” He looks over Gideon to the far wall, to his treasure trove. “Both are natural.”

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” Gideon muses, relaxing into his skin again as the sweat on his forehead cools and his just-uneven heart rate settles back into its normal, leisurely crawl. “In the forest of the night.”

Lecter replies, “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

Sighing wearily and closing his eyes Gideon mutters, “You make a lamb out of anyone who crosses you, don’t you.”

A low hum is his only response for a long time. The hand that tracks to Gideon’s forehead is still unwelcome, more so now for his recent injury at that hand. It’s much later when Hannibal is cleaning up the mess of his blood and dressing him again, expertly, in his warm, dry blue-striped robe that he says, almost out of context by the time he speaks, “I hunt many different types.”

Gideon studies him, struggling to be more concerned about their conversations than the fact of the drains built into the table upon which he’s lying.

“That’s why they haven’t caught you.”

“Will did.”

“You managed to catch him first.”

Lecter smiles, eyes glistening with that same joy from before.

“He won’t stop until you’re dead, you know,” Gideon tells him, voice soft and throat aching marginally less once he gets some water in him. “You’re the only beast he’ll hunt; maybe the only one he’ll ever need to hunt.”

“Some things are inevitable,” he coos, smile softening but still quite visible. “And natural.”

There are worlds upon worlds of things Gideon can say to him, manipulative psychoanalysis aside, but he lets it go. He lets Lecter leave him in the darkness with only the shallow breathing of his distant companion to fill the void around him. He can’t see through the shimmering, ethereal walls boxing him in.

He wonders if she is awake; he wonders if he surmised the correct identity. If he called out to her he wonders if she would answer, if she physically—or mentally—possessed the ability to respond at all.

He tries it.

“Abigail Hobbs?”

There’s only breathing, but it’s labored, provoked.

He tries again, bolstering himself with a long, steady lungful of oxygen in and out.

“Are you alive over there?”

There’s a brief period of shuffling quiet and then louder shuffling. He hears a soft, fleshy slap of skin on brick. It’s as good as a wave or a shout of greeting.

He lays back, eyes drifting closed because he can’t see anything down here anyway. Quieter now that he trusts she can hear him if she chooses, he murmurs, “Well, I hope it means something to you.”

Gideon waits, and for a long time all he hears is his body buzzing and the house settling. Far off some cars rumble on the streets above; he thinks there may be a freeway nearby. He’s starting to doze off when he hears it: another dull slap of skin on brick and then another and then another. They’re noticeably weak, but what he hears rather than feebleness is a pulse, a beating heart, breath traveling through lungs.

Life adheres to rhythms after all. Sleep cycles, birth and death, sickness and recovery, bondage and liberation.

He nods to himself and wonders about recovery and liberation for all of five seconds before deciding he should start with smaller expectations. He starts with sleep, and it comes tugging at him, surprisingly and unsurprisingly, fairly quickly.

“Good night, Miss Hobbs,” he whispers, holding out as long as it takes for the resounding _pat_ to come.

When it does he lets his dreams take him. They’re amorphous and constantly shifting and collapsing in on themselves, not unlike smoke.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics by Elbow
> 
> From Bryan Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (Futamono): “The tragedy is not to die, Abel, but to be wasted”; “It’s hard to have anything, isn’t it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. A damn slippery life.”  
>  >>The second one is originally from Thomas Harris’ _Red Dragon._
> 
> From Mukozuke: “Life is precious.”
> 
> From Franz Kafka’s _Metamorphosis_ : “No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor’s flesh, so it remained there as a visible reminder of his injury.”  
> http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5200/5200-h/5200-h.htm
> 
> The circles of hell come from Dante’s _Inferno_.
> 
> Will Blake’s “The Tyger” comes from _Songs of Experience._
> 
> I tagged this as not compliant with canon because of the last bit. It's just me making guesses and being sneaky. It's not explicitly spoiler-y; it's just made up.


End file.
